In an increasingly networked world, more and more traffic, such as data, voice, and video, is transmitted over public and proprietary networks. Wireless networks, in particularly, are becoming increasingly popular as networks through which subscribers obtain both voice services (e.g., telephone calls) and data services (e.g., email and web surfing).
In both wired and wireless networks, users may access resources using textual meaningful identifiers as an “address” for the resource. For example, the domain name “verizon.com” may be entered by a user to access a web site hosted by the company Verizon Communications Inc. Internally, the user's computing device may translate the textual domain “verizon.com” into a numerical internet protocol (IP) address that may be used by the computing device to access the requested resource. This translation may be performed based on requests to a Domain Name System (DNS), which is a distributed database used to translate the textual domain names, which are meaningful to humans, into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices.
DNS servers may handle DNS translation requests from devices in the network. Because network devices may generally need to wait for a response to a DNS request from the DNS server before accessing the desired resource, efficiently processing DNS translation requests can be important in optimizing network performance.